I believe responding to the question "What should we keep?" doesn't have to be easy as from such a massive volume of data if not of immediate value some data might be of value for a space exploration data archive.

Deciding on the value of such fascinating data is most likely not an easy task.

WKash, you made an excellent point about government becoming a fertile breeding ground for big data scientists. I think data scientists are like any other professions but since they are costing something in the range of 120k to 300k illustrates that they are in short supply at the moment. Hence it is nice to see the White House taking interest in Big Data as throughout the economy and global economy data scientists are needed badly.

I understand that it is becoming a trend to have a major economic crisis once every 50 years or so, it happened during the Dutch Tulip trading till the 2008 housing crisis, some say that the bit-coin market is next while others say that it is a new form of currency, speculations aside, student debt will be the next crisis if the students do not get real jobs soon -- a situation which I think could have been avoided if Big data was used while giving out student loans.

Brian, thanks for weighing in. It would seem that NASA, NOAA, Commerce, the IRS (not to mention the CIA) and other federal agences handling big data sets will become fertile breeding grounds for the emerging field of data scientists -- and hopefully the tools that can support senior leaders who aren't data scientists, but still need the insights big data analytics can provide.

Brian, thanks for weighing in. It would seem that NASA, NOAA, Commerce, the IRS (not to mention the CIA) and other federal agences handling big data sets will become fertile breeding grounds for the emerging field of data scientists -- and hopefully the tools that can support senior leaders who aren't data scientists, but still need the insights big data analytics can provide.

Good point and I am sure that this number of 24 is already understated because I guess, they are only counting the people who have math and programming skills as data scientists but even then right besides them would also exist people with math and astronomy skills, or math and climatology skills, that are needed for the exact same job to even function.

It requires a lot of money, but at the end of the day if they manage to mine data to produces valuable insight like the "Hubble Deep Field" which changes entire perspectives or cosmic inflation etc then I think it is money well spent.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.